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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29020416">simply not vibing with the xylophone</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CordeliaRose/pseuds/CordeliaRose'>CordeliaRose</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Morey Appreciation Week 2020 [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Teen Wolf (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Harps, M/M, Theremins, Various levels of success in said various musical instruments, Violins, various musical instruments</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:48:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,624</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29020416</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CordeliaRose/pseuds/CordeliaRose</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Mason tries out various musical instruments, with equally various levels of success.</p><p>For Morey Appreciation Week 2020, Day #4: Musical Endeavours.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Corey Bryant/Mason Hewitt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Morey Appreciation Week 2020 [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123970</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>simply not vibing with the xylophone</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>hellooooooo everyone. here we are, day 4. this is probably the most i've ever posted in such a short span of time. even if the fics aren't very long, i'm still proud of myself!<br/>moment of vanity over, how are y'all? we had some lovely heavy snowfall recently and my princess of a dog refuses to go out in it, but she has a lot of energy so i'm basically spending half of my waking hours trying to entertain her at the moment. it's a lot of fun. just while typing this, she's walked across the laptop and keyboard twice in a bid for attention. please keep me in your thoughts.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s someone torturing a flock of woodland creatures to death when Corey pushes open the doors to the music wing, guitar in hand. He frowns – obviously, this is a newcomer, judging by both the sound and the fact that they haven’t closed their door properly. Each room is soundproofed, but the doors are sticky and you have to actually shove them to get them closed. Newbies often don’t realise, and gift the rest of them bleeding ears.</p><p>He follows the trail of broken, screechy notes down the corridor until he finds the culprit, and grabs the door handle to gently pull it closed. No need to embarrass whoever’s sawing away at their violin. Except when he glances up through the little glass window in the wooden frame – </p><p>“Mason?”</p><p>Mason, white-knuckling the neck of a violin and glaring at the sheets on a music stand in front of him, barely registers or acknowledges his presence. “Hey,” he says absently, angling the bow and drawing it across the strings again. It sounds, if possible, even worse than before. “The violin is hard.”</p><p>“Yeah, especially without a teacher,” Corey agrees. He sets his guitar down by the door, makes sure it’s fully shut behind him, and moves forward cautiously, much like someone would approach a cornered animal. “Why the, uh, sudden interest in music?”</p><p>At that, Mason sighs and drops the violin from his chin. He spins to face Corey, face a picture of defeat. “I need my college applications to stand out more,” he explains morosely. “So I figured I should get really good at an instrument.”</p><p>Corey chooses to skip over the fact that Mason has a four-point-nine GPA and academic extra-curriculars out the wazoo, and doesn’t need anything extra to pad out his application, in favour of pointing out tentatively, “Most people who are really good at the violin start when they’re kids. Even the most talented musicians have to build up muscle memory, you know?”</p><p>“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” Mason looks at the violin woefully. “I don’t think I’m going to become a prodigy overnight.”</p><p>Corey has no doubt that Mason is taking this far too personally and a sign of his worthlessness, because Mason is a typical kid-genius and considers himself a failure if he is not immediately perfect at anything he sets his mind to. And now he feels like a monster, because Mason’s face is too cute to look so depressed. He has to fix this. “How about we look for some unusual ones instead?” he offers. “If you played something weird, then you don’t have to be, like, orchestra-level, right? Because people will just be surprised by the instrument itself, and they won’t have a thousand other players to compare you to.”</p><p>Mason stays silent for several torturous seconds, and just as Corey is convinced that he’s just made the entire situation worse - “You’re a genius,” Mason declares, and sets the violin to rest on top of the room’s piano. Corey can’t help but feel a pang of empathetic relief that the gentle beast has been finally laid to peace after such vicious mutilation, and spends the rest of his enrichment period practicing his scales while Mason scours Google for inspiration.</p>
<hr/><p>The first instrument that Mason decrees to be worthy of unusual enough is the double bass – or stand-up bass, nobody on the internet can agree. </p><p>Well, truthfully, the first one he finds and gets worked up about is the lyre, but it turns out that lyres are pretty rare and thus pretty expensive, so he settles for a double bass.</p><p>A week later, they’re back in that same music room with a loaned double bass – the school has an ongoing deal with the local orchestral society – and a YouTube instructor talking through the basics. Mason’s playing isn’t horrible by any means, and is definitely miles ahead of his maiming of the violin, but after half an hour, he decides that it’s simply too big. “This wouldn’t fit in my car,” he points out, “so it would just be a hassle trying to get it around.”</p><p>Corey has to agree – he’d carried the cumbersome instrument in its case from the front of the school, where the orchestra had dropped it off, through to the music room, and despite his supernatural strength it was a struggle. It was just too big to hold comfortably in any position – on his back, he had to bend almost in half to avoid being Gillooly’d, and dangling from his hands it kept grazing the ground so he had to twist his spine unnaturally and transform himself into a hunchback. </p><p>So the double bass, or stand-up bass, is ruled out, and returned to the orchestra. The director, however, bumps into them when she comes to collect the instrument that afternoon, and offers her help upon hearing of their quest for an unusual instrument. She tells them that the Beacon Hills Concert Hall will be open until ten that evening, and if they come in through the main doors, follow the right fork of the corridor, take the third left and then a right, they’ll find practice room eleven. In there, there are some of their more uncommon instruments, and they’re welcome to trial them.</p><p>Enthused once more, Mason drives them there once the school day has ended. He proclaims that he is simply “not vibing” with the xylophone, and the harp gives them both an hour of grief as they struggle to decipher how to handle it, which string is which note, and then how to avoid being crushed by it when Corey lets go and its entire weight rests on Mason.</p><p>The bagpipes don’t bear mentioning.</p><p>None of the instruments in there make the cut, though Corey gets a few cute pictures of Mason, eyebrows knitted together as he tries to assemble a flute, and a video of him wrestling with a tuba that he will treasure forever.</p>
<hr/><p>Mason is more than a little disheartened by his musical flops, and seems apt to declare the entire mission a disaster. He’s run through his – admittedly meagre – list of instruments that aren’t common but also exist in quantities greater than three (looking at you, hyperbass flute), so Corey sets out on his own mission. There’s a small steel drums group at their school, he shares homeroom with Nichelle, the leader. She’s always been friendly and she’s only too happy to offer up her lunch period to teach Mason the basics out in the courtyard.</p><p>“I enjoyed it,” Mason tells him later, “but it felt like cultural appropriation. I mean, they said it wasn’t, but it’s a Jamaican instrument, and my family’s Nigerian. Nichelle’s a second-generation Jamaican immigrant, and her grandfather is a really well-known steel drummer in Jamaica. He taught her, so it just felt a bit…I don’t know, dickish to be learning when I didn’t have any background in that culture.”</p><p>“What did Nichelle say?”</p><p>“She said it totally wasn’t, because it’s not a closed culture, or anything, but also that she understood and she didn’t want me to be uncomfortable. She also said you were cute.”</p><p>“Nooooooo,” Corey complains, pulling his shoulders up to hide his blush. He feels mildly uncomfortable whenever he’s reminded that other people perceive him. </p><p>“Yeeeeeesssss,” Mason insists, pulling Corey into his side and slinging an arm around his waist. “And thank you. For setting this up.”</p><p>“It’s nothing. I have a couple of other ideas, too, if you want to try them out.”</p><p>“What would I do without you?” Mason presses a kiss into the side of his head as they amble out to the parking lot. </p>
<hr/><p>“That made me feel so powerful. I have a major adrenaline rush right now.” Mason hops down from the stool, grinning widely. “And I love the aesthetics of the whole thing, and the sound of it, but it’s just too…”</p><p>“Religious?”</p><p>“Yeah. I know that an organ doesn’t have to be a God thing, but still.” Mason glances around them. “Chapels are really pretty, though. Christians kind of went off with the stained-glass windows.”</p>
<hr/><p>The second-to-last instrument that Corey’s planned for is the accordion. A friend of a friend plays one, and after some Facebook messaging and offers of baked goods – Corey makes really good brownies – he presents an accordion to Mason.</p><p>It doesn’t last long.</p><p>“I feel like a pervert playing this,” Mason says after five minutes. “I don’t know why. I just do.”</p><p>“You look like a pervert playing that,” Corey agrees.</p>
<hr/><p>The last instrument is, funnily enough, one that Corey has himself. He covered some shifts at the restaurant for another of the servers, Tina, when one of her uncles had suddenly died and she needed to travel to another state for the funeral. She’d thanked him profusely and gifted him with a theremin, for reasons still unknown.</p><p>Corey has never attempted it himself, but it really seems like the kind of thing that would be up Mason’s street. He transports it to the Hewitts’ the next weekend, clutching it carefully on the bumpy bus ride over, and then pulls up a downloaded PDF manual on theremins for Mason to scour.</p><p>“I love this,” Mason pronounces after an entranced hour of waving his hands around the instrument. “Listen to it!” He twists his hands and wiggles his fingers and the theremin wails back at him. “This is a miracle of science. I love it. I love you.”</p><p>Corey settles back against the couch as Mason spends the next few hours gesturing aggressively at a small box and exclaiming gleefully when it screams back at him. It’s times like this that make him realise that him being a supernatural chimera is far from the weirdest aspect of his life.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><a href="https://moreyappreciation.tumblr.com/">please go here to visit the official morey appreciation tumblr that's running this morey appreciation week!</a><br/>and a big shoutout to idk-ilike5sos for beta'ing this for me! you can find her here on <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/idk_ilike5sos/pseuds/idk_ilike5sos/">ao3</a> or <a href="https://idk-ilike5sos.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a>:)<br/>you can also talk to me on <a href="https://cordelia---rose.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a> or check out my <a href="https://cordeliarosebutfandoms.tumblr.com/">fandoms sideblog</a><br/>and as always, kudos &amp; comments are dearly appreciated &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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